Should you need a licence to design a freeway bridge? An
aeroplane? A skyscraper? A real-time train switching control system?
Pacemaker firmware? Insulin pump?

I am a licenced professional engineer (yea, whoop dee doo, but I have had some experience with this) and
everywhere I've worked in my field (i.e. not software!) there have been many unlicenced
staff working under the supervision of a licenced engineer. Most
of the time this is required by law, but sometimes it is
simply required by the client, who wants some assurance of
quality (and no, ISO 9000 ain't gonna give you a better bridge).

Granted, the safety argument is a no-brainer, so let's just
consider costs. A poorly designed road may be safe enough,
but it might not last very long, meaning higher maintenance
costs and capital replacement costs, both of which can be estimated fairly accurately. What does a
bug in a banking system cost? An inventory control system? Is it
because these are harder to quantify (that is if anyone wants them
quantified which I doubt) that few seem to care?

Like it or not, I think software will become regulated
as a profession sooner rather than later, and it's up to all you
who think of yourself as software professionals to see to it
that standards are set, met and kept.
Just as a clarification, licencing doesn't have to mean Big Brother, as
most professions are self-regulated under powers granted by the government,
but not controlled by government. Sure it takes away the sort of
microchip cowboy image that many enjoy, but that can be reserved for your
time off. When society is paying the tab, it eventually learns to get
what it wants.

But I do not think that you should need a license to be a
paid programmer.

Neither do I. I think that most companies need to be
required to hire at least one licensed programmer. Most of
the programmers will continue to be unlicensed and continue
to be paid but will be supervised by licensed programmers.

Of course, there are no licensed programmers yet so even
that can't happen overnight. I'd just like to see things
get started in that direction because I'm sick of fixing
other companies' code.

One problem (that the original article points out) is that the term Software is very vague. Consider the following things: Web programming, database work, embedded systems, device drivers, consumer applications, video games, expert systems - one could easily go on. It's clear that these are very different skills, all lumped together.

The requirements for responsible code are very different for Yahoo Shopping and Ultima Online and Word 2020. I might have to live with periodic bugs and outages in my free online Fantasy Baseball team, but not in my pacemaker. How do you even begin to come up with licensing programs that deal with the diversity of the software world?

What about the open source world? Lots of projects have no central authority, and no real place for a 'licensed programmer'. Not to mention being hideously international. How could you begin to enforce any of this?

And practically, it'd throw a monkey wrench into the economy of small companies. Many commercial projects are just two or three people. Licensed Programmers may make sense for big companies, but for startups, they could drive up costs and create artificial barriers to entry. It's hard enough getting a software company off the ground as is.

There may be virtues to having the concept of a programming license, but the practical realities are very difficult to solve, and I think that it's far from inevitable. Companies don't want it, programmers don't want it, and consumers don't want it - at least, not in large numbers yet.